Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/123

heroism? These same heroes would never run the risk of catching cold by attempting to save a drowning man. From the hope of reward hereafter? This hope may have made the sacrifice of his life easier to Peter the Great's cossack, but the aristocrats of these days are in many cases the disciples of Voltaire, and think far less of the joys of paradise than of those lying within their grasp which this earthly vale of tears has to offer them. I can not explain this wonderful phenomenon of a devotion and veneration, capable even of self-destruction, for an individual who perhaps is not distinguished by any intellectual, physical or natural attractions, and who is perhaps of an exceedingly repugnant and despicable temperament. Münchausen relates a hunting adventure: he went hunting one day with a female hound, big with young, when he started up a hare, also big with young; his hound pursued her out of sight, and when he came up with them he saw to hip astonishment, seven little hares running along with the mother-hare, and seven little hounds chafing them with the mother-hound; both of the animals had been delivered of their young on the way, And each one of the latter had at once taken their places in the chase. Something similar seems to take place between a monarch and his subjects. The subject is from the moment of his birth, devoted to the king for life and death, as the little hounds from the moment of their birth began to chase the hares. I mean this seriously, although I express it rather lightly. Only the phenomenon of atavism can account for this loyalty to a monarch surpassing the sentiment of self-respect, dignity as a man and even the instinct of self-preservation. It is evidently a return t prehistoric ideas, an indistinct trace of habits inherited without interruption for thousands of generations, when men experience or pretend to experience, an affection for